Address Restricted, Grand Meadow, Minnesota. County/parish: Mower.
Added to the National Register of Historic Places April 08, 1994. NRIS 94000345.
2 contributing sites.Also known as:
The Grand Meadow Chert Quarry/Wanhi Yukan (GMC Quarry) is a 175-acre (71 ha) Indigenous archaeological site in Grand Meadow Township, Minnesota, United States, that was an open pit mine where chert (or 'flint') was quarried. It is the source site for Grand Meadow Chert (GMC), and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Grand Meadow Quarry Archeological District in 1994.
Originally containing well over 1000 pits apparently dug sometime between 950CE and 1400CE, the GMC Quarry/Wanhi Yukan appears to have been the most extensively-utilized Native American site in Minnesota for providing stone for making tools, and the only example in the state where there is visible evidence of chert having been extracted through digging. Grand Meadow Chert has been found at archaeological sites in 52 counties in Minnesota, including at most precontact archaeological sites in the state that are identified as being ancestral to modern Dakota communities. It also appears at sites in Wisconsin, Iowa, and South Dakota.
The Dakota language name for the site, "Wanhi Yukan," means "There Is Chert Here," following the Indigenous tradition for using place names that describe an important local resource. It was first documented in a 1994 atlas of Dakota place names.
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